Mid-Day Digest

Jul. 2, 2018

THE FOUNDATION

“While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue then will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.” —Samuel Adams (1779)

IN TODAY’S EDITION

A socialist Mexican president will only exacerbate illegal immigration.

“Abolish ICE” has become a new Democrat rallying cry.

Helicopter parenting and the border crisis make a strange pairing.

A couple of Senate Republicans hold the key for the Supreme Court.

The federal government uses your money to promote the homosexual agenda.

Daily Features: Top Headlines, Memes, Cartoons, Columnists and Short Cuts.

IN BRIEF

In a landslide victory over the weekend, unabashed socialist and former mayor of Mexico City Andrés Manuel López Obrador won the Mexican presidency, just as we noted he would Friday, becoming the first far leftist in decades to take the office. Campaigning on a leftist-populist platform that included a call for an end to the war on drugs, raising the minimum wage and free college, Obrador made the biggest international headlines with his comments on illegal immigration. He declared that poor Mexicans should “leave their towns and find a life in the United States” — that it was their “human right.” Yes, our neighbor’s president-elect called for mass migration to our country.

A brief look at the numbers should give any American pause when seeing a socialist take over a nation that is already exploiting its relationship with the U.S. on several fronts. Take NAFTA for instance. Currently, our second-largest trade deficit, standing at $70 billion annually, is with Mexico. NAFTA was billed as a means to bring about greater parity between the American and Mexican economies, which in turn was supposed to help neutralize the problem of illegal immigration. Three and a half decades later, however, and the problem of illegal immigration has only become more acute. The profits from NAFTA have done little more than increase the power of Mexican drug cartels and nearly 44% of Mexicans still live below the national poverty line.

Moreover, an estimated 12% of the Mexican population now lives within the U.S. — and a huge number are here illegally. Not only are they benefiting from the American economy and welfare, but they are sending a whopping $30 billion annually back to Mexico. Is it any wonder Obrador is encouraging illegal immigration? By cracking down, he would not only stem a significant source of revenue but would also invite the wrath of the drug cartels whose illicit trade depends upon illegal immigration and human trafficking.

What makes Obrador’s election so concerning to the U.S. is the fact that his proposed leftist policies would only exacerbate America’s border and trade problems. Look no further than the devastating effects socialist policies have had in Venezuela. Now imagine that type of economic collapse happening — accelerating — in Mexico. It will make America’s current immigration crisis look tame. Has there ever been a more important motivation than now to build the wall?

What did it take for Democrats to finally find a government agency they want to eliminate? A midterm election strategy that includes demonizing President Donald Trump and Republicans for enforcing the law at the border. As Democrats lurch left, they’re even pushing socialist candidates to primary wins. And that’s having policy consequences.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Millennial socialist who ousted the number four House Democrat in a primary last week, has called for abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It wasn’t long before Democrat 2020 presidential hopefuls followed suit. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (NY) was the first, saying, “I believe that [ICE] has become a deportation force. And I think you should separate out the criminal justice from the immigration issues. I think you should reimagine ICE under a new agency, with a very different mission, and take those two missions out. So we believe that we should protect families that need our help, and that is not what ICE is doing today.”

Gillibrand added, “Keeping our country safe cannot come at a cost to basic human rights.” Keep in mind that she’s the same senator who renewed the call for a ban on “assault weapons” after Thursday’s massacre with a shotgun, despite gun bans trampling Second Amendment rights. To Democrats, some “basic human rights” are more equal than others, but that’s another story.

Other Democrats jumped on the anti-ICE bandwagon, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Cherokee), Sen. Kamala Harris (D-2020) and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. Meanwhile, hundreds of anti-ICE protesters were arrested in the Hart office building in DC. “The president’s deeply immoral actions have made it obvious we need to rebuild our immigration system from top to bottom,” Warren declared Saturday, “starting by replacing ICE with something that reflects our morality and that works.” Democrats and morality … whoo boy.

That “morality” hinges on smearing all Republicans as racist for advocating secure borders. One Democrat strategist said as much, insisting Trump is using ICE as a tool to “radicalize his racist policies against anyone who doesn’t live in this country.” Given that, according to leftist morality, “racist” is the worst thing anyone or any institution can be, calls for abolishing ICE — and effectively all border enforcement — are inevitably going to become louder.

FEATURED ANALYSIS

The American Left has some curious ideas about what constitutes proper parenting.

Only four years ago the media disseminated a number of stories about government intervention against “irresponsible” parents. In August 2104, a Florida mother who let her seven-year-old son walk less than half a mile from their home to a park to play was charged with child neglect. A 46-year-old single mother working as a McDonald’s shift manager spent 17 days in jail for allowing her nine-year-old daughter to play unsupervised at a nearby park. And a year later in Maryland, a couple who let their two children, ages 10 and six, walk home alone from a neighborhood park were “found responsible for unsubstantiated child neglect” according to the state’s Child Protective Services.

This coverage precipitated a discussion about what was dubbed “free range” parenting in general and, more specifically, about the struggles low-income and/or single parents face regarding what to do with their children during the summer months when they still have to work and school is not in session.

Boston College psychology professor emeritus Peter Gray, author of “Free to Learn,” has little use for a mindset revealed by a Reason/Rupe poll. It showed that 68% of parents believe it should be illegal for kids nine years old and under to play at a park unsupervised, and 43% of parents believe the same prohibition should apply to 12-year-olds. Gray asserts, “I doubt there has ever been a human culture, anywhere, anytime, that underestimates children’s abilities more than we North Americans do today.”

Columnist Steve Berman emphasized the hypocrisy of what amounted to government-enforced helicopter parenting. He asks, “Are we really raising our kids in a safe space bubble, while we remember riding our bikes all hours until sunset, or until we got hungry and came home?”

Undoubtedly. Why? The most persuasive answer is technology. Despite the fact that parents who want to are now capable of tracking their children 24/7, they are also besieged by “a global, always-on news cycle, as well as increased connectivity on social media platforms, which recycles ‘over and over again’ kidnappings, rape and other threatening incidents,” Dr. Gail Saltz, professor of psychology at New York Presbyterian Hospital, explains.

What does matter? Over-protected and over-indulged children “become adults who see no problem censoring people with whom they don’t agree, seeking segregation from others who are too different from themselves to bother relating to, and asserting that they are the best of the best in all things,” Berman asserts. “In other words, we could be raising a generation of Big Brother-loving powder puff despots.”

Given this context, it remains rather remarkable how sanguine many of those same parents — abetted by the Leftmedia, the Democrat Party and immigration activist groups — remain with regard to the flood of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs) dispersed throughout the United States in recent years. In 2014, when that flood was dubbed the “border surge” by the same Leftmedia, columnist Victor Davis Hanson posed a telling question. “What sort of callous parents simply send their children as pawns northward without escort, in selfish hopes of soon winning for themselves either remittances or eventual passage to the U.S?” he wondered.

Maybe the kind of parent who has gotten the subtle-as-a-sledgehammer message that what amounted to human trafficking was enabled by the Obama administration. That reality was revealed at a 2014 Senate hearing when Mark Greenberg, Health and Human Services Acting Assistant Secretary for the Administration for Children and Families, admitted that even if the Obama administration knew it was releasing UACs to other illegal aliens, they would do so based on the “totality of the circumstances.” When pressed by then-Sen. Tom Coburn, Greenburg further admitted that the “totality” of refusing to inquire about the status of those taking custody of the UACs was HHS policy.

How did those UACs get here? Many of them rode “La Bestia,” a.k.a. “the beast” — the Mexican freight trains these children rode on top of to get though that nation into ours. Thousands of them were killed or gravely injured, and those that made it were inevitably besieged by traffickers, thieves and corrupt Mexican policemen and soldiers. Moreover, most of the female children are raped during the journey, which is the “price” often demanded for transport by traffickers. In fact, a 2010 report from the leftist group Amnesty International states, “According to some experts, the prevalence of rape is such that people smugglers may require women to have a contraceptive injection prior to the journey as a precaution.”

Regardless, the media-orchestrated outrage generated by the Trump administration’s decision to separate children from their alleged parents (one of the reasons the policy was implemented was to determine exactly that), led the president to usurp existing law and reunite them. And despite that orchestrated hype, a Rasmussen poll released on June 21 revealed that when families were arrested and separated for attempting to enter America illegally, 54% of the public held the illegal alien parents more accountable than the American government, compared to only 35% who held the government more accountable.

Even worse for those who promote an open borders agenda masquerading as “compassion,” 54% of those surveyed also agreed with Trump’s assertion that America “will not be a migrant camp” or a “refugee-holding facility.”

Yet unless Congress acts, those are empty assertions. According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), asylum requires one to be physically present in the United States in order to obtain it. Yet there’s a giant loophole in the requirement. “You may apply for asylum status regardless of how you arrived in the United States or your current immigration status,” the website states.

If the Ruling Class were genuinely interested in eliminating the incentive behind the flood of border-busters and visa over-stayers that have precipitated a staggering 1,700% increase in asylum claims over the last decade, the simplest of laws would suffice going forward:

Anyone in America illegally will automatically be disqualified from receiving asylum.

Just putting a bill like that up for a vote would provide the American public with laser-like insight regarding which members of Congress are interested in dis-incentivizing rampant law-breaking and which members are not.

The alternative? The continued congressional collaboration with the encouragement of despicable parenting choices, along with the rank hypocrisy of taking the Trump administration to task for attempting to mitigate the flood of UACs that amount to a whopping 83% of the children held by the Department of Homeland Security, enabled (read: encouraged) by previous administrations.

OPINION IN BRIEF

George Will: “Wednesday’s 5-4 decision accords with President Franklin Roosevelt’s judgment that ‘the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.’ In private-sector bargaining, unions contest management concerning the distribution of companies’ profits. In the public sector, government gets its revenues from a third party — taxpayers. Because a majority of organized labor’s members are government employees, the labor movement is mostly not horny-handed sons of toil. It increasingly is government organized as an interest group that pressures government to do what it has a metabolic urge to do anyway: grow. The deadliest dagger in Wednesday’s decision was the stipulation that nonmembers’ fees cannot be automatically deducted from their wages — nonmembers must affirmatively consent to deductions. So, public-sector unions must persuade people. No wonder they are panicking. There is no sugarcoating today’s reality. Public-sector unions are conveyor belts that move a portion of government employees’ salaries — some of the amount paid in union dues — into political campaigns, almost always Democrats’, to elect the people with whom the unions ‘negotiate’ for taxpayers’ money. Progressives who are theatrically distraught about there being ‘too much money in politics’ are now theatrically distraught that the Court has ended coercing contributions that have flowed to progressive candidates.”

SHORT CUTS

The Gipper: “We are too great a nation to limit ourselves to small dreams. We are not, as some would have us believe, doomed to an inevitable decline. … Let us begin an era of national renewal. Let us renew our determination, our courage, and our strength. And let us renew our faith and our hope. We have every right to dream heroic dreams.”

Delusional: “Our values are about supporting America’s working families, about honoring the vows of our Founders, about honoring the sacrifice of our men and women in uniform, honoring the aspirations of our children. That is why we vote so much alike because we have shared values.” —Nancy Pelosi

Pleasant thoughts: “I remember 2006. What happened is that George W. Bush — he put us in two disastrous wars and we were headed toward the biggest financial disaster since the Great Depression. So if the answer is that we need those three things to happen for a course correction, I’d prefer to move a little quicker. How about that? But I take your point. Maybe we can have, like, a nuclear war and then we get a real course correction.” —billionaire socialist Tom Steyer on getting rid of Donald Trump

Regrets: “I’ll be honest with you, if I have a regret during my presidency, it is that people were so focused on me and the battles we were having — particularly after we lost the House — that folks stopped paying attention up and down the ballot.” —Barack Obama

Warnings: “My colleagues on both sides of the aisle know that this vote [on a Supreme Court nominee] could be one of the key votes of their entire career. If [Democrats] vote for somebody who’s going to change precedent, it could be a career-ending move.” —Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA)

And last… “An originalist court stands for a simple proposition: The Founders created an ingenious system of government. We should give it another try.” —David French

Join our editors and staff in daily prayer for our Patriots in uniform — Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen — standing in harm’s way in defense of Liberty, and for their families. We also humbly ask prayer for your Patriot team, that our mission would seed and encourage the spirit of Liberty in the hearts and minds of our countrymen.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis

Nate Jackson, Managing Editor
Mark Alexander, Publisher

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